A few flaws but entertaining and romantic.
In A’s debut novel, an update of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a Nashville woman struggles with perfectionism, attraction to a Hindu filmmaker, and an overbearing mother.
Mary Poser, 23 as the novel begins, was raised to be sweet, accommodating, and cheerful. A social worker, she spreads herself thin, always running late as she frantically tries to catch up with her many commitments. Mary’s mother, a Baptist pastor’s wife, nags her to get married: “he has to be Southern, he has to be Christian, and it helps a lot if he plays the guitar”—but Jason, the mother-approved wannabe country star, has recently dumped Mary. At the Nashville Film Festival, Mary meets Simha Das, a beautiful, young filmmaker, whose next project is a Bollywood version of Persuasion. They share an instant attraction and spend the night kissing. Upset with herself, late, and trying to text and drive the next day, Mary’s car flips over a bridge into the river. She has a life-altering vision of Simha, his moonstone ring glowing with white light as he tugs her upward from watery death, but she keeps the vision to herself, becoming phobic of the bridge. Simha pursues her with sweet thoughtfulness, philosophical musings, and a night of incredible passion, but Mary feels trapped by others’ expectations. She avoids Simha and allows Jason back in her life, even though he’s far less romantic, considerate, and intelligent. Will she have a second chance to be persuaded by true love? In her debut novel, A makes excellent use of her colorful, well-described Nashville backdrop. A drawback is that Mary’s waffling and inability to stand up to her mother are developed at exasperating length. Simha is obviously perfect, maybe too perfect, while Jason is obviously a dud to almost everyone; when Mary calls herself an idiot, readers may agree. But she’s stronger than she knows, as readers can also see. Apart from overdwelling on Mary’s indecision, the novel succeeds, offering some hot erotic scenes, some surprises, a good metaphor in the uncrossable bridge, and a heroine who grows in understanding herself and her spirituality.
A few flaws but entertaining and romantic.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9876222-2-8
Page Count: 478
Publisher: Angel's Leap
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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